I’ve attended a couple of NACAC fairs. You can preregister then print out a form with a bar code. The schools scan to get your address, email, etc. The participating schools are available online so you can make a list of “targets” in advance.
Once at the fair you’ll receive a directory of schools by state. Use it to jot down the table # for your “targets”. The aisles are also numbered so it’s easy to locate the school you are looking for. The fairs can be crowded with lines forming at the more popular schools. People are generally considerate and lines move quickly. I’m always surprised to see long lines for local schools because those can be easily visited. I go straight for the schools we can’t drive to easily.
DS is done with Junior year. He went in and ordered 8 transcripts so now we need to make up the list of colleges to apply to. Right now I don’t think he cares much where he goes. I’m having him take the Latin and Physics SAT on June 4th. Not sure how the Latin is going to go but he isn’t taking it next year so I figured either he knows it or he doesn’t… He would like to be done with all the college applications before school starts in August. Although I’m not sure all the apps will be open before then. It would be a lot easier to pick colleges if he knew what he wanted to do.
Right now we are just going to look at merit aid and which ones we can afford.
@MichiganGeorgia did you order the transcripts to be sent to you, or schools? Ours sends directly to colleges, and I thought that was necessary(?). Not sure though.
At our school what they do is they put the transcript and some information about our school in an envelope and seal it with a high school stamp. We then will mail the transcripts to the colleges. Some colleges want them sent electronically however right now since I don’t know all the colleges he is applying to he just ordered the physical ones. He can pick them up after May 31st.
Getting summer research internship seems to be tougher than getting a paid full time job. DS interviewed @ local university lab. Interview went well but the professor gave him an assignment which is pick a topic and give 10-15 min presentation one week after school closes! DS really likes the lab, so he knows what to do to get in
@srk2017 wow, what an interesting assignment! Hope he gets what he wants!
@Ynotgo Could you tell me a little bit about the CMU physics visit and why it was not so good? DS put down physics as area of interest in ACT Not sure if that will stick.
@Dave_N omg $693 per night! so hard to resist! :)) BU admission building was a little tucked away, and there was no big arrow pointing to the Admissions (unlike at other colleges), so we got lost. There are several Map posts but they were not intuitive. So I would recommend familiarizing the street names and/or having your own campus map from BU website printed. I usually take lots of screen shots on my iPad (avoiding printing), itinerary, hotel/air/car reservation, maps, etc, so I had to take out my iPad and look up the building.
@srk2017 – gotta say – your DS sounds so impressive & motivated. We have an Original Science Research Program - students in 9th grade get no credit but works several hours a week in school & many more outside (start at 7am) – & then if they cut muster join the program. This means they do much more research – have to think of a project or topic, research scientists/professors/and businesses working in the field and carefully craft outreach to try to develop a mentorship to pursue a novel idea or strain of the research. This is a class though so there is support and working knowledge about what will likely help in creating this relationship and on-going learning experience. I applaud the students who put in the effort - even if no awards come from this, what hey learn is invaluable & impossible to really learn in a traditional high school classroom. For your son to pursue it on his own (is that right?) for the summer is very powerful IMO! Good luck to him. ^:)^
FYI: Colleges are updating their scholarship information based on rSAT. I recommend going back and revisiting the websites of all schools that you are looking at for merit awards.
@rightcoaster It really doesn’t hurt and since you have already done your taxes will take maybe 15 minutes to fill out if your finances are organized. They mostly look at income and a very small percentage at what you have in 529/investments. We also saved enough in 529s but my s16 is going to a school over $72K per year (we didn’t save that much!) so he is getting some financial aid. We will have money left in his 529 when he graduates though that we can transfer to our D17 if she doesn’t get as much money from her school of choice. We also got unexpected grants based on our EFC so worth the small time investment.
@Ynotgo My S16 also applied to a number of reaches EA and had one deferral that upset him but the thing that helped the most was that he had applied and been accepted to a rolling safety school so even when he was feeling bad he knew that there was a pretty decent school that had already accepted him. We were very lucky that the rest of his EA’s were acceptances but going from December to March without that backup plan definitely in place would have been really rough.
@eandesmom The latitudes are a quick way for D to compare temperatures between schools. In theory! I know that things like topography, etc. matter too, but it’s fun.
I asked earlier about a #1-ish school that has dropped off your list. Well, we had another casualty on the WBOD. WUSTL has been removed from contention. OK with me, because she would have had to try for one of those big scholarships that are few and far between (oh, yeah, she would have also needed to be admitted :)) ). It’s one less latitude-lookup, too (I must have known it was happening, since I forgot to look that one up).
S has never really had a #1 to take off the list, it’s been a struggle enough to get some on at all. CSU seemed perfect on paper to all of us, and fell completely flat so there is that. I think we are all still regrouping from that one a bit. There have been a ton discussed that never made it on. Work to be done all around though at least we have 3 likely applications so that is something. Not sure how we will make progress on the rest without tours though.
@Agentninetynine that is a very good point about healthcare. Even back in the day I was not impressed with the care offered at my campus and I really can’t imagine it’s changed all that much
@Ynotgo SLO definitely has summer session. SD is doing hers at the linked CC (and paying the OOS surcharge for it, ouch) to knock out some Gen Ed stuff at a lower price point. It’s pretty there all year but summer is lovely! We are visiting her in August, cannot wait.
@payn4ward Maybe it was just a bad tour kind of thing. He was at CMU for a hacking competition award event, and the College of CS gave the team a grand tour of lots of fascinating labs, robots playing soccer, cool hacking stuff, more robots, etc. It was all very impressive and nice to be treated so well.
He and DH scheduled a visit on the side with the CMU physics department. That department didn’t have any reason to pull out the stops for a high school sophomore. The professor they talked with wasn’t great at conversation. DS and DH didn’t really see evidence of fascinating research, and DS is all about physics research. (DH has a PhD in physics, so has some experience with other departments.) That’s not to say they don’t have great physics research at CMU, but he didn’t see it while he was there.
Sometimes a physics department will have a lot of professors who are participants in a remote group like the LHC or an astronomy consortium where they have access to data from a satellite, but not a lot of hands-on research happening right there. DS doesn’t really want to do that type of physics.
Engineering departments seem to know more about doing tours than physics. At our visit to UC Berkeley, we just got a stack of papers and a 15 minute chat with the physics departmental secretary. But, if you are in CA and thinking about physics, you can’t write off Berkeley based on one person.
Also, the UC that is 5 minutes from home, while not Berkeley, is ranked somewhere from 10th to 15th as far as physics departments in the US go. So, he/we don't see that much advantage to applying to CMU in physics, which is lower ranked in physics and really far away. (CMU is, of course, top 1 to 3 in CS depending on who you talk with.)
@srk2017 Based on all his other ECs, I’ll bet your son will give a great presentation to that lab!
@2muchquan Temperatures such as January Lows and September Highs or precipitation (rain fall or snow fall) may be more useful, but I guess the latitude is just one number so that may be simpler. Analysis Paralysis
Re: Latitude
Here’s another thing to track in our BOD, SOS, etc: ability to see the “Great American Eclipse” on August 21, 2017. Some move in dates might conflict with this, so it’s at least something we’ll be aware of related to 2017 vacation plans.
If you’ve never seen a total solar eclipse, they are completely unlike a partial solar eclipse or a lunar eclipse. They are absolutely stunning, and I’d highly recommend seeing one if you can sometime in your life. We’ve seen 3 1/2 (one got rained out for us, but it did get dark), and we are wanting to see this one. Wyoming is supposed to be one of the better places for not being clouded out.
@dcplanner I looked at the list of rolling admissions colleges here (http://blog.prepscholar.com/colleges-with-rolling-admissions) and there aren’t that many in CA that aren’t religious, art, or for-profit schools. There are some Cal States, so he could check the Northridge box on the CalPoly application. He does already have California’s ELC thing, which means he will get admitted to UC Merced at a minimum.
@payn4ward Oh, I have those numbers too. Synthesized down to a single number for D, who is trying to climb off the bus before it stops.
Wow, @Ynotgo that is really cool. It looks like South Carolina is a good spot to view it, too. High likelihood of being in the vicinity at that time. Thanks for posting.
